MARKET SEGMENTATION

Computers & TechnologyTechnology

  • Author Adeel Shafiq
  • Published September 21, 2024
  • Word count 1,235

Understanding your audience isn't just about reaching them, it's about connecting with them— because the right segment leads to the right success.

But the main question is “Why market to everyone when you can win over the right ones?”

You can get a solid chance to Maximize your impact by marketing smarter, not harder, with precise segmentation by Reaching the customers who matter the most.

It becomes much more convenient for you to target your product, sales, and marketing strategies with the help of marketing segmentation.

Let us take you through the process of how important marketing segmentation is and what practices can we adopt regarding the success of our business.

What is market segmentation?

Marketing segmentation is the process of dividing a broad target market into smaller, more manageable subgroups or segments based on shared characteristics. These segments can be defined by various factors such as demographics (age, gender, income), psychographics (lifestyle, values, interests), geographic location, behavioral traits (purchase habits, brand loyalty), or their combinations.

You can describe Marketing segmentation as the art of dividing or specifying your targeted market or audience into approachable groups.

IMPORTANCE OF MARKET SEGMENTATION:

Market segmentation gives you ways to do effective and efficient marketing, advertising, and sales. Instead of targeting a wide audience with generic messaging and offers, market segmentation enables brands to produce specificity to each segment's needs.

Consider an advertising campaign organized around a particular market segment. A brand can select relevant targeting criteria to reach users who fit the criteria of that market segment.

Segmentation helps marketers to be more proficient in terms of time, money, and other resources. Market segmentation lets companies understand their customers more precisely. They gain a better knowledge of customer’s needs and therefore can create campaigns for customer segments most likely to purchase products.

Types of Market Segmentation

Market segmentation makes it convenient for marketing teams to develop highly targeted and effective marketing campaigns and plans.

Below we’ve outlined a few types of marketing segmentation to get a deep overview of this topic:

Geographic – based on land, rural or metropolitan area.

Demographic – based on age, gender, income, occupation, education, nationality.

Psychographic – based on social status, lifestyle type, and personality type.

Behavioral — based on the intensity of product use, brand loyalty, user behaviors, price sensitivity, and technology adoption.

Demographic Segmentation

Demographic segmentation divides the market based on factors like age, gender, occupation, education, income, and nationality. It’s straightforward to implement and cost-effective to gather data. For example, face wash products are often segmented by gender—men’s vs. women’s face wash.

Behavioral Segmentation

Behavioral segmentation categorizes consumers based on their behaviors. This allows companies to create their messaging and marketing strategies for specific actions and preferences of their target audience.

Geographic Segmentation

Geographic segmentation divides the market based on location, such as town, county, zip code, or country. It can also consider climate and population density. Understanding a customer’s location helps tailor marketing efforts to regional needs and preferences, including language differences.

Psychographic Segmentation

Psychographic segmentation focuses on mental and emotional factors, including personality traits, values, interests, attitudes, and lifestyles. While harder to observe than demographics, psychographics provide deeper insights into customer motivations and preferences, enabling more relatable and targeted content.

Benefits of market segmentation

Market segmentation makes it easier for marketing teams to develop highly targeted and indeed several benefits that exist with understanding and defining market segments.

Greater company focus

Identifying specific market segments allows a company to concentrate its efforts on targeting these groups with products, services, content, and campaigns. By focusing on particular segments, companies can ensure they match the right product with the right audience, maximizing their return on investment (ROI).

Serve the customer’s needs and wants

Having defined segments enables companies to satisfy a variety of customer needs by offering different bundles and incentives. Different forms and promotional activities will be used for different segments based on that segment's needs/ wants and characteristics.

Market competitiveness

When a company focuses on a specific segment, its market competitiveness increases. Which in turn will lead to a higher ROI. The company is focused on specific segments and learns everything they need to know about that segment, to market their products to them.

Market expansion

With geographic segmentation as discussed earlier, market expansion is possible immediately. When a company understands its segments and how to market to a segment in a particular location, it can expand immediately into another nearby location. If segmentation is based on demographics, then once the company knows their demographic segment they can expand in that segment with similar products.

Targeted communication

Even when product features and benefits remain the same, companies must create their communication with different segments. For example, senior engineers might prefer detailed technical information delivered through white papers or infographics, while project managers might be more interested in content focused on cost savings and efficiencies, presented in blogs, case studies, or videos. The messaging should vary for each segment, as should the platforms used to reach them. The key is to understand each segment thoroughly and deliver relevant communication through the appropriate channels.ffective marketing campaigns and plans.

Below we’ve outlin

Examples of market segmentation

CVS Pharmacy, a subsidiary of CVS Health, provides a great example of demographic-based market segmentation. CVS adjusted its in-store product offerings to suit the needs of customers in urban versus suburban locations.

In urban stores, where customers tend to shop like they're in a general store, CVS made it easy for them to find grocery items, snack foods, and household essentials like toilet paper and batteries.

On the other hand, in suburban stores located near general-purpose retailers like Walmart, customers were less likely to shop for household items.

Instead, CVS designed these stores to place health and beauty products conveniently near the pharmacy, where customers typically came to pick up prescriptions. This approach allowed CVS to create the shopping experience for the distinct needs of these two demographic segments.

Pros and cons of market segmentation:

We are aware of the fact that every coin has 2 sides. Same as with the marketing segmentation. With all the benefits we’ve discussed above, there are some precautions that we need to take care of. Some of them are discussed here:

High costs: If you want to target specific segments, you may need a bigger marketing budget to make customized products, create targeted advertising campaigns, and do a market segment.

Filtering potential customers: If you focus too much on specified areas of segment, you might miss your potential customers.

Complexity: It can be a difficult process that requires detailed analysis and research. This can be hard for smaller businesses with fewer resources to do.

Measuring proficiency: It may be hard to know how effective a segmented marketing strategy is because it may not always be clear which segment is responsible for the success or failure of a campaign.

Solutions for market segmentation(conclusion):

Market segmentation is a highly progessing strategy for organizations because it lets them know which customers care about them and understand their needs to ensure their brands presence.

It also lets us to decide the loyalty of the customers related to our brand.

So, It is indeed that Market segmentation is like a gateway to increase revenue, better engagement, and the cherry on top: the success of your business.

Target your audience: find them, reach them, engage them… OWN THEM!

Email Marketing Specialist With over 10 years of experience in digital marketing, I specialize in crafting targeted email campaigns that drive engagement, build brand loyalty, and increase sales. As a seasoned email marketer, I have a proven track record of developing and executing strategies that deliver measurable results.

Website: https://www.mumara.com

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